Peeling Onions – Adrienne Rich

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!   There’s not a sob in my chest. Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt   I pare away, no hero, merely a cook.   Crying was labor, once when I’d good cause. Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds raw in my head, so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare. A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my…

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“Dreamwood” by Adrienne Rich

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, she thinks, a map laid down to memorize because she might be walking it, it shows ridge upon…

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